The winter breeze outside had turned to a freezing rain, but the air inside the litter on the way to the palace was even colder.

PAULINUS saw one of the Praetorian soldiers flirting with a slave girl when he was supposed to be on duty. “Go on ahead,” he told his father, and paused to give the man a brisk tongue-lashing. Hastening back toward the triclinium, he saw that Lady Flavia and her family had already arrived. The boys had gone ahead with their father, their exuberance awed by the magnificence around them, but Lady Flavia had paused in the adjoining anteroom, berating one of her slave boys. Thea’s son, Vix, Paulinus saw, and he quickened his step.

“—you’ll keep well back, you horrid child, until the banquet is over and then I’ll drop a word in your mother’s ear and you can see her—”

Vix wore an anonymous slave tunic with the badge of Flavia’s family, but he had no slave’s servility as he stared around the sumptuous mosaics and pillars of the new palace. “Whoa. This is some pile.”

“Why did you bring him?” Paulinus lowered his voice.

“Thea hasn’t seen him in months, I thought she might like—” Flavia hauled Vix back by the neck of his tunic and smacked him before he could prowl behind a column. “I’m beginning to think better of the idea.”

“Keep him in the anteroom out of sight,” Paulinus advised. Flavia’s wail followed him toward the triclinium.

“Since when can anyone keep the little monster anywhere?”

LEPIDA

A tedious evening, quite unlike that lovely banquet at the Domus Augustana that had celebrated Paulinus’s betrothal. Everyone was being very formal tonight in the massive state banquet room of the new palace, subdued voices murmuring politely about inconsequentials, backed by the splashing of the massive oval fountain framed in the arched windows. Lady Flavia was engrossed with her husband, her two sons were pestering the fat little astrologer with questions, Marcus and Calpurnia were discussing some boring political theory or other, and Paulinus—Paulinus was ignoring me. Talking to the Emperor, his eyes a shade reserved. Had they quarreled? Well, who cared? He was ignoring me, and he’d even refused my last invitation. Something would have to be done about that.

My eyes fell on Thea. She’d worn carmine-colored silk, rich purple-red like old blood embroidered all around the hem with jet beads, a jet circlet dipping low on her forehead. Moping, hollow-eyed, ignored by the Emperor—

But she still sat on the same couch as the Emperor. In the place his wife would have occupied had she been there.

A big Greek in a white silk tunic bent to restock her plate, and my eyes sharpened. Her slave? He was a handsome one, whatever his name was. Tall, golden, muscular, beautiful. He leaned down, a lock of wheat-fair hair falling over his brow, and Thea gave him her first smile of the evening as he touched her hand.

“Athena.”

She jumped, but the Emperor’s voice was jovial. “You must sing for us.”